Professor Mary WRIGHT
Professor of Higher Educational Scholarship at Educational Innovation, DVC (Education & Students) The University of Sydney, Australia
Biography
Dr. Mary C. Wright is currently serving as Professor of Higher Educational Scholarship at Educational Innovation, DVC (Education & Students) at the University of Sydney, Australia. Prior, Mary served for over eight years as Associate Provost for Teaching and Learning, Executive Director of the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, and a Professor (Research) in the Department of Sociology, Brown University. Previous to Brown, Mary worked at the University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching for 13 years.
Mary’s most recent book, Centers for Teaching and Learning: The New Landscape of Higher Education, was published by Johns Hopkins Press in 2023. She is a co-editor of the International Journal for Academic Development (IJAD), the journal of ICED (the International Consortium for Educational Development). Developing High-Impact Course Design Institutes: A Model for Change(Troisi, Palmer, Wright, Hostetler, Hurney) was published in 2025 from Routledge. Her fourth book (Wright, Tracie Addy, Bret Eynon, Jacci Rivard), Educational Development in an Age of Change, is a large longitudinal study of U.S. educational developers, 2006-present, with anticipated publication from Johns Hopkins Press in 2026.
Mary is also a former president (2017-18) of the POD Network, the US professional association for educational development. In 2024, she won the organization's highest award, the POD Network’s Bob Pierleoni Spirit of POD Award. She is a co-author on the ACE-POD Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) Matrix (2017), which created operational standards for CTLs, as well as Defining What Matters (2018), which established guidelines for CTL evaluation. She is also a co-author on the Equity/Excellence Imperative: A 2030 Blueprint for Undergraduate Education at Research Universities (Snyder et al., 2022; available: https://my.ueru.org/boyer-2030-report/about-the-commission). Mary’s PhD area is sociology, from the University of Michigan, and her BA degree is from Princeton University (sociology).
